In recent years a large and successful business has been developed which employs flexible plastic fasteners of a type designed to be inserted through hollow slotted needles for tagging or for joining two objects together. Such fasteners, together with apparatus for applying them, have been widely employed for the attachment of buttons to garments, for price tagging in retail establishments, for the pairing of items such as shoes, and in various industrial applications. Such fasteners and apparatus are shown in numerous references, including among others, U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,103,666; 3,399,432; 3,380,122; 3,444,597; 3,457,589; 3,470,834; 3,659,769; 3,733,657; 3,759,435; 3,875,648; 3,893,612; 3,895,753; and 3,948,128.
Most conveniently, plastic fasteners have been provided in assemblies for feeding sequentially through the dispensing apparatus. They have been supplied, as shown for example in U.S. Pat. No. 3,103,666, attached by means of severable necks to a runner bar, or, as described for example in U.S. Pat. 3,875,648, as a stock of continuous side members cross-coupled by a plurality of filaments, from which individual fasteners are severed. Fastener assemblies employing runner bars limit the number of fasteners which can be conveniently supplied in a single assembly and waste material since the runner bar is not put to productive end use. While these limitations are partially overcome by the fastener stock described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,875,648, a need has persisted for improvements in manufacture and in feeding and dispensing the fasteners, especially for applications such as price tagging where a single fastener end-bar is dispensed by means of a hand powered tool.